Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion on the case of June Medical Services v. Gee reveals how his views could allow for laws that reduce access to abortions, The Daily Beast reports.
The case concerns a Louisiana law that requires doctors who provide abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital. The Supreme Court ruled to block the law, since no health, safety or medical reason for it could be found, just as it had a similar law passed in Texas that it ruled as placing an “undue burden” on women in 2016.
Kavanaugh argues that since the Louisiana law has a 45-day grace period, then if doctors who perform abortions could get admitting privileges at a hospital then there was no “undue burden” on women.
“The point of a facial challenge to a law like this is that the law itself is unconstitutional,” writes the Daily Beast legal affairs columnist Jay Michaelson. “The ‘undue burden’ exists… because of any future doctor who wants to provide reproductive health services. It exists because… a law with no scientific basis is itself an undue burden. Justice Kavanaugh’s logic would greatly reduce the scope of that precedent.”
Michaelson proposes an analogy in which a law is passed that requires doctors who perform abortions to “wear polka dotted shirts with striped ties and clown shoes,” and argues that by Kavanaugh’s logic, if the doctors could obtain the clothes, this would not constitute an “undue burden.”
“By construing ‘undue burden’ only as applied to specific doctors (and thus women), Justice Kavanaugh’s logic would allow all kinds of pointless regulations, as long as doctors could somehow comply with them,” Michaelson notes.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.